What makes a social network “work”?
Typically, we say that a social networking service works when it achieves some of these:
- Community – gives users the ability to create communities they can feel a sense of belonging to.
- Freedom of expression – expands people’s ability to speak their mind in a … umm… meaningful way ? (looking at 4chan’s /pol/).
- Rich expression – actually offers tools to express yourself (presence of features like markup, formatting, embeds).
- Constructive culture – becomes an environment where people learn and participate in constructive and fun activities — like university clubs. (Sorry for the example, but Reddit’s r/anime comes to mind.)
- Privacy & safety – respects users’ privacy and safety.
- Developer support – provides good developer tools.
- Example: In Numbers: The Best Anime of the Decade from MyAnimeList — a huge data-driven article made possible by open tools and APIs. (also a huge web page, might take forever to load all figures)
Feel free to add more points, or challenge the ones I’ve listed.
It seems like a general consensus here on Lemmy that — no matter how many times you try — Reddit will always slip from Aaron Swartz to u/spez.
Why do you think that is?
Disclaimer: I wrote the post by myself, but used AI to refine my bad English and markdown,
Because of what a corporation is. I believe that individually run businesses and cooperatives can work really well, and I think they could function for social media, but in both those business models the quality of the product is the stakeholders experience connection to the product and aren’t accountable to a higher yet disconnected power.
A corporation isn’t like that. A corporation exhibits the ideology of a cancer cell because it disconnects the ownership from the labor and product then distributes it as a financial instrument. It is the abstraction of a living business into many minuscule pieces of capital. Decisions are therefore abstracted away into more and more faster
This means two things: the corporation’s goals will always be to find the maximum point of money extracted from each customer * number of customers, this encourages simple, bland, and extractive products, and that due to the need to keep growing the corporation is incapable of seeing when it has hit that point and will continue attempting to find more users, reduce costs, and increase prices.